~The MCME Times~ #9/16

Minecraft Middle Earth is a Minecraft community that recreates the world described by JRR Tolkien and his writings. Everyone can participate in organized events in which we collaborate to create major landmarks, terrain, caves, castles, towns, farms and more.

Head Designer

Oh boy was this a busy Sunday... From Will's MCME Reunion party which I only could join for some Cards against Humanity and Team Fortress, and then over the extra-long Audiobook session to more ordinary stuff like writing elvish song lyrics (#OnlyTolkienNerdThings) all was available to keep me busy until very late at night, and as of course the last thing we all want is a Times in lessened quality I decided to give myself one more day of time for it.

So pretend it's still Sunday and you haven't worked all day long yet and enjoy this week's MCME Times!​

Whats Up?

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Breaking News

Hehe looks like I found a way to motivate you guys . Opposed to the 14 submissions from the 3 weeks before, I got a staggering 172 responses during the last week. Among that were 123 questions that I did take into the final list of questions, 25 questions whose format, content or lore did not match the needs of the plugin and 24 that were otherwise unusable. Ontop of that @JordD04 gave me another 50 questions from the time of JordPoints, of which I reused 47. For the donation I'm about to make this yields a total of 170$. Well done guys!
All in all I have now got 400 questions, the target is 500 - 1000 questions, so please feel free to submit more! Here's the form link again: Questions for Minigame plugin​

If only all those peaks would have names as all the villages do, then the awesome progress that is being done on terrain would not sound that boring every week . Well, jacen has been very busy with his mountains and has done a lot towards adding materials, especially trees, to the slopes of the peaks near the /warp Hallowmere marsh. Check it out ingame!​

2 New villages built, 1 needs yet a name [workin' on it - Finrod], for the other one do /warp Etherhill - built by @Wraith_Knight. Other people working steadily on their villages (@_Luk & @Tyranystrasz). Several other artists built farms aswell. (@Darki190 & @Durin_IV)- kisos ed. Finrod

Some great progress this week! All of the houses are now ruined and efforts now turn to the main keep, which is being gracefully griefed by a team of selected artists who have demonstrated their keen ability to ruin in the past. Keep an eye out for jobs on ruining the surrounding walls as this will be the next big step towards completing fornost.- Fireinferno13​

The only thing I got down to make this week is continueing fixing up all the glaciers in the area. When the Audiobook departs from Rivendell in 2 weeks everything between there and Moria should be finished (at least on the western slopes).

Mandos has done a lot of work towards preparing the jobs in the Gladden Fields.​

@Thijs1801 has finished voxelling the city part of the terrain and is now moving on to the surrounding areas. The first houses are now being placed on the tip of the Angle, the first big building of course being a lofty inn.​

MCME-Architect is an assortment of small plugins of all kinds. Eriol is currently reviewing and cleaning up the current features of the old version known as BuildFixes, as well as adding new features to it and thus revive it as MCME-Architect.
New features may be:

Ever wondered what the Super Secret Settings in your options menu was? Well, looks like Brash has found out . Using that you can get a simple shader pack, without requiring to install Optifine or any other mods.
Instructions and more here: Simple addons to all packs/downloaded/from server​

Brash is also tinkering around with our oh-so-boring GUI, trying to use a screenshot as GUI base texture. So far this is only an idea, if we can find a pleasing combination of functionality and visual appeal we will decide whether it may become a fix pack addition or an optional download.​

As media of the week I'd like to present you Born of Hope, an awesome fanmade micro-budget movie about Arathorn and Gilraen, Aragorn's parents. The reason I present this is because the director of these movies has just published the first episode of a new fantasy series by the name of Ren: The Girl with the Mark. More information here: Ren - A fantasy web series |

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Other news

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Audiobook review

Last Sunday we travelled all the way from Bree to the Fords of Bruinen; 3 hours may have been a bit long for one session though .
Thanks to @Wraith_Knight who took again a series of nice screenshots:

Yeah my most favorite aspect of Tolkien - the elvish languages - strike the Times once more. This week I wanna try to clear one very common misconception off your heads: There is no language called "Elvish".

In fact, the term "Elvish" refers to a whole group of languages. The special thing about them however is that all have a common ancestor, usually referred to as the Common Eldarin (Eldarin being mostly equal to the term "Elvish"). From there developed many different languages, reflecting the division and journeys of the elves: While they all awoke at the lake of Cuivénen in the far east of Middle-earth, they started traveling towards the Undying Lands in three groups, of which again more groups splitted off, e.g. the Nandor, also known as Woodelves, who never crossed the Misty Mountains, then next the Sindar who stayed on the western shores of Middle-earth, and then the Vanyar, Noldor and Teleri, who all inhabited different regions of Valinor. Specific to the need of these differently living and differently minded groups, their languages developed accordingly. And thus they did not all speak just elvish, but instead the Nandor speak Nandorin, the Sindar Sindarin and so on.
In Middle-earth of the Third Age we mainly have three kinds of elvish: Sindarin, Quenya and Nandorin. Quenya is a later form of the Noldorin and was brought back from Valinor to Middle-earth when Feanor and his fellow Noldor were banned from the Undying Lands. As due to the treason of the Noldor Quenya had been prohibited in Middle-earth by the Sindar-ruler of that time, it was the Sindarin who established itself as most commonly used form of elvish, that was also spoken by many men, while Quenya only remained as a language for ceremonials and such things.​

Next week we will remain in Rivendell during the entire 2-hour session, so be sure to bring popcorn to the Council of Elrond, it may take a while until they find the obvious solution of sending the weird halfling with the ring to Mordor.
Start will be on Saturday, March 12, 19:00 GMT.​

Tours

There are no Tours announced for this week yet, but keep an eye on this thread and request a tour if you want one!​

Jobs & Plotbuilds

Jobs for next Saturday will be announced in this thread over the course of the week. Be sure to ask Designers for jobs at any time, maybe they can offer something!​

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.”
- John Green

Slab Fanatic

1) Sorry I missed the proofreading but I had to bring up one thing: under the new plugin, is it supposed to read "an assortment"?
2) I feel like the question "Do you speak Elvish" is still a valid question. You could perhaps compare it to asking if I speak a Romance language. It doesn't refer to a specific language, but by answering yes you are just saying that you speak quenya or sindarin (or something else if you're a supernerd like finrod).

Head Designer

2) I feel like the question "Do you speak Elvish" is still a valid question. You could perhaps compare it to asking if I speak a Romance language. It doesn't refer to a specific language, but by answering yes you are just saying that you speak quenya or sindarin (or something else if you're a supernerd like finrod).

Theoretically yes, but practically I assume it would be just as weird as if you ask someone IRL whether he speaks any romance language. But it's anyway only supposed to be a catchy intro to the topic^^